Category Archives: Assignments

r12: Digital Essay

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htoCf1Owk4I

Sorry for the late post… I’ve had nothing but headaches with technology on this.

So my project began with a feeling of nostalgia—with the end of the year coming up so quickly, I was constantly reminiscing about my time here at Duke.  Similarly, my diving career had just come to an end.  Having consumed 10 years of my life, it’s been tough to let go of it all.  And so I figured, what better way to spend time lingering in the past than to make a video, with narration and pictures and a few video clips, to recap it all?

That being said, my project starts with a some words on the screen, telling a little about my story.  I then talk about my entry into college, discussing some of my worries, fears, etc., before I really even bring up my time at Duke.  I wanted to set the stage for my turnaround (and I had a pretty big one), so I emphasized the partying and disappointment (in my diving) that I felt in the beginning of my video.  I wanted to show a progression, so when I talked about my surgery, I made sure to note that it was at this point that I decided to make a commitment to turn things around.  Not surprisingly, a little bit of work ethic produced better grades and better results in the pool, and I spend the middle of my video talking about those strides that I made.  At the end of the video, I look back on all the people I met and experiences that I’ve had that have changed my life completely.  I end with a narrative that kind of brings the story full circle, and I decided to have a little fun with it in the end, just to show that I’m not a completely different person (I still like to have fun!), I just have a different perspective and a different set of priorities now.  I then have a couple of my best dives from over the past two years inserted at the end, just as sort of a fun thing to finish it with.

In the end, I loved doing the project, but I’m just frustrated with how time consuming the technology aspect was.  I was prepared to spend hours recording, editing, etc., but I wasn’t ready to spend equally as long (if not longer!) trying to download programs to compress or convert files, letting those programs run, using different platforms for different parts of the essay, etc., etc., etc.  It’s definitely been quite the experience!

 

r12: Poetry off the Page

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In a digital world, many people wonder if books will be replaced by pixilated text. While a digitized form may not be the best manner to present a full-length book, shorter pieces of work may benefit from the combination of text, audio, and video. Digital poetry, Internet poetry, or “poetry off the page” is a new realm of creative writing we must explore in this technological era. My essay took the form of an iMovie, which wove together examples of digital poetry, emphasizing how the internet could transform something from just text to something more.

The original idea for my essay was sparked by a youtube video of Otep preforming “Baby’s Breath.” In the comments section, there were varying opinions concerning whether or not the video was poetry. I initially wanted to make the argument that more things are poetry than we realize, and that poetry isn’t necessarily constructed in ABAB rhyme. Music, writing, video: all of these things can be poetry in their own way; however, the question of “what is poetry” seemed too expansive to cover in a single essay. For that reason, I narrowed my focus to “what is digital poetry.”

Working with iMovie proved to be a struggle. Often times the program would crash (in fact, it gave me great difficultly this morning when I tried to export my video), freeze, or simply be unresponsive. In addition, I had never worked with iMovie before, only having the class tutorial to guide my work. Regardless, I managed to compile a series of poetic examples into an eleven-minute movie, letting the words, audio, and video speak for itself. On my second draft, it seemed that more text and explanation was required, and I tweaked my movie, replacing examples, finding new audio, and, most importantly, adding text. The result is uploaded on youtube.

Obviously, working with iMovie gave me several advantages to working with a text. The inherent nature of digital poetry would not be conducive to a standard essay form: I could describe the interactive nature of some of the poems, but you would not be able to see me interacting with them. You would not be able to hear poets speaking or watch performances of poems. Therefore, the major affordance of working with a digital form of writing was to go beyond merely describing my examples–to actually show the readers a digital poem.

r12

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whosafraidofthepen.wordpress.com

My digital essay “Who’s Afraid of the Pen” is an exploration into adolescents’ habits, beliefs and predispositions about writing through a close analysis of three students’ responses to interview questions. It occurred to me as an interesting topic as we first brainstormed the blogs, and I quickly found that it was a topic about which I wanted to write more than a measly 400 words. Several of my posts neared one thousand before I had hardly scratched the surface of the topic for that week.

It seemed intuitive then, to continue that work, and to transform it in a way that would carry some of the interpretive work I had done in the blog, but to rework it such that it was in a format that was meant to be assessed (accessed?) in a few number of sittings, and that wasn’t supposed to have the overt temporal that a blog has , at least to me.

this is the kind of calculated idiocy I used to manipulate the tone of my essay

Relatedly, I really enjoyed trying to mesh different forms of media together. It would have been exceedingly tedious of me to have to transcribe dozens of minutes of student interview. With this format, I didn’t have to. I could let the students speak for themselves and to each other, while I sat back and drew connections, made commentary. Although I feel that I did some serious intellectual work here, writing in such a context made me feel more free to play with the tone of my own writing, such that I think I manage to come off as a a voice with authority (somewhat) that can poke fun at itself as well as the pseudoscience of trying to make claims about students every where, or even all across Durham, by studying three students in the same school. I felt very few constraints in the wordpress medium. It was intuitive enough for me to use technically, and the added affordances felt like opportunities, not hurdles to be leapt or obstacles overcome.

r12: Hidden Hunger

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My project and I definitely developed a love-hate relationship throughout this process. It went through a lot of revisions in concept. When we were first asked to think about our digital essays, I thought right away of these Did You Know? videos I viewed in a marketing class. My topic was actually inspired by the presentation of those videos and the content of my blog. I wanted to take a different angle on food by examining the differences between World Hunger and US Hunger through the presentation of straight facts.

However, I realized the difficulties of comparing the two subjects as it treaded a dangerous line–the proof that one issues was more sever than the other. This led me to focus more on examining US Hunger. When I came across this animated chart, I thought I would apply it to an expository on the subject. In Draft 1 of this essay, I thought I would preset the issue of US Hunger through a series of Myths and Truths. However, when I finally came down to putting the video together, I thought the most appropriate tone and presentation of this topic was through an examination with a sole purpose of raising awareness. The final product feels more like a documentary that looks into what US hunger is and how people can get involved to stop it. It ended having a much more serious tone than intended.

Overall, I think the video does a better job than an essay I could have written via print for a couple of reasons. Through this medium, I could have pictures that came and went with the message so it would only emphasize my content when I wanted it to be emphasized but not something eyes could be drawn to as the audience moved forward in the essay. In addition, I could do a couple animations that I think are easier to follow with the content (ie. I explain that 49 million people is equivalent to the population in Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia added together by visually showing that–I mean even just listing it here doesn’t do justice; I do a math problem that moves with the content that people can’t follow in their mind easily; and a show a moving infographic that points how poverty affects almost all the states in the US).

After figuring out exactly what I wanted to do, the technical difficulties to making a video made this project extremely time consuming. I had to do a lot of timing and positioning that was rather tedious but necessary to make the material look like a video. In terms of content, I also faced the difficulty of how far into the issue I wanted to present. I had done a lot of research on the issue, but 1. I found out I simply didn’t have the time and patience to necessarily turn everything I researched and could easily put into a written essay something I could turn into in terms of animation. 2. I realized that videos get long really fast  and it’s really hard to stuff in all the information you want in as well. I found it hard to make a coherent story that wasn’t too long or too dull.

r12: A Tale of Mother & Son

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My digital essay, A Tale of Mother & Son, can be found in its keynote format (the format I would like anyone who has keynote to view it in) here, and in its Quicktime format (for those of you who do not have Keynote), here.   A Tale of Mother & Son is a humorous story about a mother, Harriet, who happens to be a dog (mine, actually), and her son, Rollo, who is also a dog, and also mine, and the change in their relationship over time.

The story is about how Harriet and Rollo have a very human, and a very humanly dysfunctional, relationship.  Harriet is a selfish mother who neglects her only son, Rollo, and pursues pheasants and runs in the park all day without a care in the world for her son, Rollo.  To cope with his terrible relationship with his mother, Rollo sees a therapist every Tuesday (Mrs. Smith to be precise).  The turning point in the story is when Harriet has a mid-life crisis (as we humans often do), and “sees the light.”  She realises that pheasant-chasing and running through Hyde Park offer her no joy when she knows her only son Rollo is feeling rejected.  Harriet, very sensibly, seeks peace with Rollo but by this time, Rollo is very serious, and does not believe his mother could turn a new leaf so soon and so genuinely!  In the end, Harriet gives Rollo a tummy rub (his very first), and Rollo succumbs to his Mother’s apology, and after this particularly expert tummy rub, Rollo and Harriet are not just mother and son…they are friends.

I knew from the start of my project that I wanted to form some sort of spoofy story centred on my dogs: Harriet and Rollo (they are so cute after all).  I originally thought about doing the project in powerpoint  because I like how the slides and their timings can tell a story, just like a book might.  I switched to Keynote when I fiddled around with it and saw how many more options there were for effects.  After my first draft was finished, I played around with the project to add more of a “second voice” to it (the text written on the slide provides a humorous sub-text to the voiceover of each slide).  To do this, I made all the font for the second voice in the same style and in italics, so that the reader would pick up the pattern.  I also workshopped the presentation so that the slides transitioned more smoothly, so the story was easier to follow.

The most frustrating part of my project was exporting the keynote to a quicktime movie (Apple does not make it easy).  Every time I exported it, the music would get lost.  I hope that most of my classmates view the project in its Keynote format since this format has music… but for those of you without it, the Quicktime version is exactly the same, just without music.

r12: Wrapping Up

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It’s Kind of Like This: The Life of a Rider is more a digital poem than a digital essay. Its aim is simple: to showcase how – even when my horse is uncooperative and my boots are caked in mud and nothing seems to be going quite right – the sport has totally captured my heart, and there’s never a day when I’d want to be doing anything else. Of course the tears and triumphs aren’t unique to my experience alone, but the photos are – I hope that they’ll serve as a visual representation of how I, as a rider, feel every step of the way.

This presentation was created using VuVox, a platform that was entirely new to me just a month ago but has quickly become a favorite of mine. It lends a sort of slideshow feel to my photos while still allowing for them to flow cohesively. My original idea had been to use a Prezi and have different sections for different aspects of my equestrian life – riding at my barn at home in Michigan, my relationship with the horse I lease here in North Carolina, and my experience with the Duke University Equestrian Team and coach. That quickly seemed too formulaic and – honestly – boring, and I needed something that moved more like a narrative. I wasn’t just looking to educate viewers: I wanted my passion for the sport to shine through. VuVox allowed me to wax (just a little) poetic on behalf of my love for horses while still putting these multifold aspects on display. The narrative came about organically, just from all the things I encounter during all my days at the barn and at horse shows – I threw in different ideas as they came to me over the course of a few weeks.

Selfishly speaking, I also wanted a reason to show off all the photos of my adorable horse that I’ve taken since I started leasing him at the beginning of the year. I took hundreds of photos (and had two of my friends at the barn take several of me riding) with no plan at all about how to use them. It didn’t matter, because I had so many that I found I could represent just about any sentiment that came to mind, and if there was one photo I particularly liked, I structured a piece of the narrative to fit it. Lucky for me, riding is a highly visual sport, and my horse is pretty photogenic (if there are treats involved), so I was able to integrate all of the best shots (like the one below) into my presentation.

R12: Call Me, Maybe- What smartphones are trying to sell us

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My digital essay, entitled Call Me, Maybe, is about the marketing and advertising of smartphones on TV commercials.  In this project I analyzed five different brands of smartphone ads, noting the strategies they used, the impressions they made, and their general level of effectiveness. The presentation was done in Prezi, which made it easy to combine video clips with text. After going through all the commercials, I went on to explore broader issues, such as why the industry uses this type of marketing, and what the future holds for smartphone advertising. While the title will be outdated by the time next year’s class reads the description, the ideas and concepts discussed in the essay will hopefully still be relevant.

I first came up with the idea for this project while I was at home for a weekend, watching cable television instead of my usual online bootlegged shows. I began to notice the force of the messages in commercials for iPads, computers, smartphones, and other technological devices. These products are all relatively new, and yet the commercials were painting them as entirely essential. I wanted to explore how those in advertising managed to do so, as well as why they were using old media to advertise for devices that mainly utilize digital media. Ultimately I narrowed my focus down to smartphones, as I thought it would be easier from a comparative perspective to look at the same type of device.

My initial instinct was to work with iMovie, since I thought it would be easy to insert the commercial clips into the film, but I quickly realized that this would make for a long and boring digital essay. The whole movie would have ended up lasting 20 minutes, with blocks of text interrupting semi-entertaining video clips. After going over my options within the group workshop, I decided on Prezi, which allows for the combination of pictures, video clips, and texts, and is still able to provide a linear narrative.

Prezi proved to be the optimal choice for this type of presentation, since the viewer of the digital essay can choose to either follow my train of thought sequentially, or jump around, watching only the ads they have time for or are interested in. It also gave me freedom in a visual sense, since I was able to include my comments on a video within the same frame as the video clip itself. Prezi also allowed me to spatially group together the intro, body, and conclusion of the essay, providing a literal framework for the progression of the story. It allowed me to be somewhat formulaic with regards to the analyses of the advertisements, using the same shapes and overarching themes for each brand. This consistency made my readers more able to draw comparisons and know what to expect. With regards to sizing, I could emphasize more important markers or points by making them larger.

While Prezi proved successful for this type of multimedia presentation, it isn’t the type of presentation that is conducive to paragraph-long blocks of texts. Often I had to break up ideas into multiple boxes of text, or make lists of bullet points, since a paragraph would be confusing from a visual perspective. Additionally, there were parts of the essay that didn’t necessarily need to follow a particular sequence (such as the order of the ads), but I was forced to make choices on which commercials the viewers would see first, and in what order. This might have created an impression regarding importance or effectiveness that I didn’t want to make. On a more technical note, frames always had to be the same shapes, so at times it was difficult to get the exact right shape and focus on a specific idea.

While I used the first workshop to determine the right sort of formatting, the second workshop was really useful in terms of content. Before the workshop my digital essay didn’t follow a very clear sequence. My analysis of the ads was the most solid part, but my classmates didn’t really know what point I was trying to make. They suggested to me that I come up with a stronger introduction and a clearer conclusion, which utilized the same voice present in the ad analyses. These would guide the reader to come up with their own ideas about why the ads matter, and give them something to think about after seeing the ads. Ultimately I decided to look at the size of the industry and why companies are still focusing on TV advertising in my concluding statements. I also inserted more pictures, to keep the presentation visually interesting even after the TV commercials stopped screening.

r12: Final Drafts, Presentations, and Arcade

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I’d like us to spend our last class meeting presenting your digital essays. This closing celebration of your work will be in two stages.

Presentations:  Affordances and constraints

I’d like each of you to offer a brief presentation of your digital essay to the class.  Plan to speak for 3-4 minutes—absolutely no more! In the second half of the class, people will have plenty of time to read through your piece and talk with you about the substance of your work. So in your presentation, I’d like you to focus on what composing for the digital media allowed you to do, and what doing so made difficult. Point to particular moments in your essay that allow you to discuss:

  • How your project developed, from idea through drafts and revisions to final product,
  • What you felt you were able to express that you could not have done in print (affordances),
  • What proved difficult for you in working in this medium (constraints).

At the start of this course, I asked the question: What changes when you write not for the page but the screen? This is your chance to offer an answer.

Final drafts: A digital arcade

The Paris Arcades

Please post a link to the final version of your essay to this website. We’ll spend the last half of the class walking about the room, viewing and discussing one another’s work

In the body of your post, write a version of your presentation of your project to the class. The written form of your presentation may be read by people outside this class, so you might want to:

  • Offer a somewhat longer description of your actual project—a “teaser” to attract readers;
  • Say a little more about the history of your project, about how you developed it;
  • Insert an image from your project.

Please post your work to this site by 2:00 pm on Tues, 4/24. Use r12 as your category. Your post and presentation will count as r12. Your final draft will earn a letter grade. I look forward to a fun last class!

r10 Black Thought, No Roots

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Our conversations about social media and how we use it often leads to ideas of convenience, immediacy, and popularity. Both Microstyle and The Digital Divide do well to explore the frequency and form with which we use social media and mobile technology; however, what is missing from their analysis is a more social/anthropological examination of technology that exceeds the generation gap. Enter Duke’s own Black Thought 2.0.

This series of panel discussions, which streamed live, explored how African Americans use social media and mobile technology. Some of the arguments, like those of Mark Anthony Neal, are very thought provoking, and while the focus on the black community’s familiarity with innovative technology is in itself interesting, what makes this conference so thought-provoking is that it continues the discourse of the benefits and detriments of social media and web 2.0

I’m still kicking myself for not going.

Becoming More Human

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As I was searching for a piece to add to our conversation about technology, I came across a TED talk by anthropologist Amber Case. In her lecture, she talks about the implications of having technology so accessible and makes some interesting points. She entitled her talk “We are all cyborgs now” because of our reliance on technology in almost every facet of our lives. The biggest takeaway for me from this talk was the way that technology is making us become more human. Though technology is an exogenous instrument we use to oftentimes facilitate life, it greatly fosters one of the key parts of human life – connections.  The fact that the Internet is helping us communicate with each other more is a development that looks and feels more natural.

Case does point out her concern of our growing dependence of technology. For adolescents, she is concerned about their development because the world is so accessible they may not be accustomed to having to sit still and reflect on self. Her point her adolescent development was a bit reminiscent of Digital Divide. I am still a firm believer that adolescents can set aside time to be alone and turn off the technology when they see fit. Perhaps growing up with constant accessibility to contact people may affect perceptions about self reflection but to answer that question only time will tell.

I think the best part of this talk is the kind of conversations it will spark. Case introduces some interesting points. She suggests that technology is transforming us into us into a new form of homo sapiens. Take it or leave it, it’ll spark discussions that will engender more thought about the effects of technology on us.